One of the nice things about NaNoWriMo is that spending lots of time around plenty of other people who like books is very helpful in getting new book recommendations... I learned about this fantasy series at one of the writing events last month and have just gotten around to actually reading it. (Which means I've finished the first four books in the series and am working on more. I think there are seven books in all.)
It's quite good. A lot of these novels have problems creating any kind of serious internal conflicts for the heroines and heroes; given that I occasionally thought this one was going a bit overboard on the self-doubt and regret, it definitely doesn't have that problem.
Without getting too much into spoilers (read as: you may want to stop here if you haven't read it yet, but don't have to), I also liked the way it brought the main characters into the central conflict of the story. There's a great evil that's hunting for magical artifacts it can use in its nefarious plan... and it's already mostly done with that stage, forcing the main characters to scramble a bit if they want to cause any disruption to the plan at all, and putting them at a serious disadvantage for almost all of what I've read so far.
However, the antagonists still make mistakes too, and the protagonists do a great job of using those to their advantage. It ends up making both sides seem very realistically flawed while still allowing everyone to have their chance to do some very clever scheming and plotting.
Also (major spoiler alert) there's plenty of magical fireworks once one gets far enough into the series, so if what you really want is to read about an entire castle getting melted by a magical blast of fire, you can have that too.
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